Amazon and Allrecipes team up to take on Blue Apron’s meal kits

We've heard rumblings that Amazon might be ready to take on Blue Apron with "prepared food kits," and now it looks like it's finally here. Today, AmazonFresh and Allrecipes.com announced a new partnership that will allow for meal preparation delivery. Top recipes on the site will now have an embedded option allowing users to purchase the ingredients for same-day delivery through Amazon Fresh.

To use the service, you should first select AmazonFresh as your grocery retailer of choice in your Allrecipes.com account. Then, find the recipe you want to make and locate the option to send the ingredients to your AmazonFresh shopping cart. This option will only be available on the site's most popular recipes.

You'll then be sent to AmazonFresh to check out. While Allrecipes will choose recommended food brands for you, you will have the option to swap them out for your preference in the AmazonFresh cart. You can then select a delivery time, whether the same day or the next, before checking out on Amazon. A spokesperson confirmed to Engadget that this service would only be available in the markets that AmazonFresh currently operates in.

(Amazon Fresh / Allrecipes.com)

There's a few notable things here. First, this isn't exactly a Blue Apron analogue. While specific meal ingredients will indeed be delivered to your door, the service does not choose the dishes for you. On the front end, you'll have to do a little more work, but the flip side is that you can actually choose the dishes you make. In traditional services, you're locked into a very limited choice of meals per week. The ability to choose your meals (a big complaint amongst subscribers to services like Blue Apron) is really key with this partnership, and likely why it will do well, but the restricted AmazonFresh geography means that it's not a true Blue Apron competitor.